The special House election held Tuesday in Ohio's 12th District headlined an evening that also featured primary contests in Kansas, Michigan, Missouri, and Washington. Sifting through the results for information about the contemporary political landscape reveals confirmation of three existing trends, plus one more unusual development. So, three non-surprises and one surprise—adding up to a picture of "(mostly) more of the same":
1. The Ohio election received considerable national media coverage, just like previous special congressional elections held over the past year or so in Georgia, Alabama, and Pennsylvania. In all four of these contests, a district or state that was ordinarily a Republican stronghold produced a highly competitive and closely divided race for the first time in many years. In Alabama and Pennsylvania, Democrats eked out a narrow win; in Georgia and (apparently, barring a surprise twist) Ohio, Republicans managed to barely hang on. Thus, the Ohio results can be added to the existing set of clues that the national electoral environment has shifted substantially in the Democrats' favor since Donald Trump became president, but they don't themselves hold much independent importance. Given the results of previous special elections, recent polling data, and campaign fundraising totals, there was already more than enough reason to believe that Democrats are poised to gain a substantial number of House seats in November—unless the prevailing political winds shift dramatically before then.
2. The remarkable success of female candidates in Democratic primaries continues to be the biggest electoral story of the year. Women won the Democratic nomination for governor in Kansas and Michigan last night, will inherit the safely Democratic House seat in Michigan held for 53 years by ex-Rep. John Conyers, and will advance to face Republicans this November in the competitive districts of MI-07, MI-08, MI-11, WA-03, WA-05, and (probably) WA-08. Again, these results are hardly a surprise given the outcome of previous primaries, but they extend what has become an extraordinarily important evolution in the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party.
3. While some corners of the political media continue to anticipate an ideologically purist rebellion within Democratic ranks led by the supporters of Bernie Sanders in 2016—expectations that were given a shot of rocket fuel after the upset victory of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in a New York House primary last June—there continues to be little evidence of a consistent national trend in this direction. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez both endorsed Abdul El-Sayed for governor of Michigan, who finished a distant second in the primary on Tuesday, and Ocasio-Cortez also personally campaigned for Cori Bush, who challenged veteran Democratic incumbent Lacy Clay in the St. Louis-based MO-01 seat but fell well short of victory. (Honest Graft maintains a long-standing skeptical stance toward claims of an imminent left-wing revolution within Democratic politics, for reasons that have been set forth at greater length in previous posts.) To be sure, two other key developments on Tuesday in Missouri—the rejection of a state "right to work" law via ballot referendum and the defeat of a veteran St. Louis County prosecutor in the wake of the Ferguson protests—can be interpreted as liberal victories, but they also both fit comfortably within our own view of the Democratic Party as primarily advancing the interests of its social group coalition.
4. The biggest surprise of the night occurred on the Republican side, where Donald Trump's public endorsement of Kris Kobach in the Kansas GOP gubernatorial primary did not lift Kobach to a comfortable victory over incumbent governor Jeff Colyer. (As I write this, the vote count is neck and neck; Kobach may win, but he can hope for a slim advantage at best.) After Trump intervened in other primaries—most recently, for governor of Georgia—on behalf of candidates who cruised to easy victories, it appeared that he enjoyed an impressive kingmaking power due to his personal popularity among the Republican electorate. But the president may learn why his predecessors have normally been reluctant to wade into internal party contests—if your anointed candidate struggles, it makes you look weak, politically speaking. And Donald Trump is not a man who likes to look weak.
Showing posts with label Special Election. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Special Election. Show all posts
Wednesday, August 08, 2018
Wednesday, March 14, 2018
Pennsylvania Special Election Recap: Good News for Democrats? Yes. 100+ Seats in Play This Year? Not Quite.
It's always possible to overinterpret the outcome of a single special election; at the same time, even one more data point can help us make a little bit more sense of the political world around us. Here are a few things that can be gleaned from tonight's results in Pennsylvania:
1. The photo finish between Democratic candidate Conor Lamb and Republican nominee Rick Saccone (with Lamb currently in apparent position to eke out a victory) in a district previously considered safely Republican indeed represents a notable development, but not a shocking one. It comports with the historical pattern of electoral politics: the opposition party reliably makes gains in midterm elections, and the magnitude of the swing is correlated with the (un)popularity of the president. The importance of tonight's outcome lies primarily in its confirmation that these dynamics still hold today as they have in the past. But the current state of President Trump's job approval rating and the congressional "generic ballot" polling already signaled that 2018 is likely to be a good year for Democratic candidates.
2. Even so, the outcome in PA-18 may itself prompt members of the Washington community to revise their predictions about what's likely to happen in November, although there's plenty of existing information on which to base their analyses. There's an undeniable psychological difference between expecting something to happen and actually watching it occur. I remember the 2006 midterms, when—despite piles of survey data pointing to a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives—a number of pundits had a hard time actually envisioning an end to what at that point was a 12-year Republican reign over the House until the votes actually came in on the night of the election.
As for the parties themselves, whatever spin we hear from either side doesn't mean very much. What's important is what they do. Will Republicans start to act as if they believe their majority is now in serious danger? Will there be criticism directed, on the record or on background, by rank-and-file members of Congress toward Republican leaders, including the president, for putting the party in such a precarious position? Or will incumbents sincerely adopt the view that the results in PA-18, along with those in the Alabama Senate race last year, reflected a mismatch in candidate quality more than a fundamental deterioration of the GOP's electoral strength?
3. Special elections can also be opportunities for the parties to test out their campaign messages in advance of a national vote. One lesson that the Republicans appear to have taken away from their Pennsylania experience is that the December tax cut bill is of limited popularity and/or salience in the electorate. Since the current congressional majority has few other accomplishments for which to claim credit, this suggests that the fall elections will be fought over something other than the legislative record of the past two years. (It's likely at any rate that the midterms will be dominated by Trump and Trumpism regardless of what most individual candidates do.)
4. It's common for election analysts these days to use the 2016 presidential election results, or measures derived from them (such as the Partisan Voting Index, or PVI), as a benchmark to characterize the party leaning of states and congressional districts: a +5 Clinton seat, a +10 Trump seat, etc. In general, presidential and congressional voting results are strongly correlated, making these figures good rules of thumb in most cases. But there are still parts of the country where voters behave somewhat differently when choosing presidential and non-presidential candidates; moreover, the distinctive candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (and, before that, Barack Obama) have the potential to produce slightly misleading pictures of the "fundamental" partisan composition of a particular constituency.
Specifically, it's worth noting that while PA-18 gave Trump a 20-point margin over Clinton in 2016, Democrats still slightly outnumber Republicans in the district's party registration figures. Washington County, most of which lies within the district, supported Trump over Clinton by 60 percent to 36 percent and Mitt Romney to Obama in 2012 by 56 percent to 42 percent, but had narrowly preferred John Kerry to George W. Bush in 2004 and had given Al Gore a 53-44 advantage over Bush in 2000.
Of course, things have changed since 2004, and recent elections are more predictive of future outcomes than more distant ones. But it's worth keeping in mind that the world of American politics did not experience a complete rebirth in 2016, rendering all previous history irrelevant. With more time and perspective, we'll be better able to tell how much of the 2016 alignment represents a "new normal" and how much is a temporary deviation from longer-term patterns.
The demonstration that a Democratic candidate like Lamb could win back many former supporters, especially among the white non-college population, who had defected in 2016 is good news for the party. Democrats are defending multiple Senate seats in states that not only supported Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, but also shifted significantly in the Republican direction in 2016—including Missouri, West Virginia, North Dakota, Indiana, Montana, and Ohio. In order to avoid a devastating series of defeats in Senate races this year, Democrats need to attract voters who had previously backed the party's candidates but who either abandoned Clinton for Trump or merely stayed home.
At the same time, I'd recommend being a bit wary of the claim, oft-repeated during Tuesday night's coverage, that there are more than 100 Republican-held House seats that are more electorally vulnerable than PA-18. Again, that's true if we use PVI or Trump's 2016 margin over Clinton as the sole measure of partisan competitiveness, but PA-18 has more of a Democratic tradition—and labor union presence—than most other districts that gave Trump (and Romney before him) comparable margins.
Republicans undoubtedly appear to be in serious danger of losing their 24-seat (now, perhaps, 23-seat) House majority later this year. But any implication that the number of seats gained by Democrats in November could approach triple figures is not exactly realistic.
1. The photo finish between Democratic candidate Conor Lamb and Republican nominee Rick Saccone (with Lamb currently in apparent position to eke out a victory) in a district previously considered safely Republican indeed represents a notable development, but not a shocking one. It comports with the historical pattern of electoral politics: the opposition party reliably makes gains in midterm elections, and the magnitude of the swing is correlated with the (un)popularity of the president. The importance of tonight's outcome lies primarily in its confirmation that these dynamics still hold today as they have in the past. But the current state of President Trump's job approval rating and the congressional "generic ballot" polling already signaled that 2018 is likely to be a good year for Democratic candidates.
2. Even so, the outcome in PA-18 may itself prompt members of the Washington community to revise their predictions about what's likely to happen in November, although there's plenty of existing information on which to base their analyses. There's an undeniable psychological difference between expecting something to happen and actually watching it occur. I remember the 2006 midterms, when—despite piles of survey data pointing to a Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives—a number of pundits had a hard time actually envisioning an end to what at that point was a 12-year Republican reign over the House until the votes actually came in on the night of the election.
As for the parties themselves, whatever spin we hear from either side doesn't mean very much. What's important is what they do. Will Republicans start to act as if they believe their majority is now in serious danger? Will there be criticism directed, on the record or on background, by rank-and-file members of Congress toward Republican leaders, including the president, for putting the party in such a precarious position? Or will incumbents sincerely adopt the view that the results in PA-18, along with those in the Alabama Senate race last year, reflected a mismatch in candidate quality more than a fundamental deterioration of the GOP's electoral strength?
3. Special elections can also be opportunities for the parties to test out their campaign messages in advance of a national vote. One lesson that the Republicans appear to have taken away from their Pennsylania experience is that the December tax cut bill is of limited popularity and/or salience in the electorate. Since the current congressional majority has few other accomplishments for which to claim credit, this suggests that the fall elections will be fought over something other than the legislative record of the past two years. (It's likely at any rate that the midterms will be dominated by Trump and Trumpism regardless of what most individual candidates do.)
4. It's common for election analysts these days to use the 2016 presidential election results, or measures derived from them (such as the Partisan Voting Index, or PVI), as a benchmark to characterize the party leaning of states and congressional districts: a +5 Clinton seat, a +10 Trump seat, etc. In general, presidential and congressional voting results are strongly correlated, making these figures good rules of thumb in most cases. But there are still parts of the country where voters behave somewhat differently when choosing presidential and non-presidential candidates; moreover, the distinctive candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump (and, before that, Barack Obama) have the potential to produce slightly misleading pictures of the "fundamental" partisan composition of a particular constituency.
Specifically, it's worth noting that while PA-18 gave Trump a 20-point margin over Clinton in 2016, Democrats still slightly outnumber Republicans in the district's party registration figures. Washington County, most of which lies within the district, supported Trump over Clinton by 60 percent to 36 percent and Mitt Romney to Obama in 2012 by 56 percent to 42 percent, but had narrowly preferred John Kerry to George W. Bush in 2004 and had given Al Gore a 53-44 advantage over Bush in 2000.
Of course, things have changed since 2004, and recent elections are more predictive of future outcomes than more distant ones. But it's worth keeping in mind that the world of American politics did not experience a complete rebirth in 2016, rendering all previous history irrelevant. With more time and perspective, we'll be better able to tell how much of the 2016 alignment represents a "new normal" and how much is a temporary deviation from longer-term patterns.
The demonstration that a Democratic candidate like Lamb could win back many former supporters, especially among the white non-college population, who had defected in 2016 is good news for the party. Democrats are defending multiple Senate seats in states that not only supported Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton, but also shifted significantly in the Republican direction in 2016—including Missouri, West Virginia, North Dakota, Indiana, Montana, and Ohio. In order to avoid a devastating series of defeats in Senate races this year, Democrats need to attract voters who had previously backed the party's candidates but who either abandoned Clinton for Trump or merely stayed home.
At the same time, I'd recommend being a bit wary of the claim, oft-repeated during Tuesday night's coverage, that there are more than 100 Republican-held House seats that are more electorally vulnerable than PA-18. Again, that's true if we use PVI or Trump's 2016 margin over Clinton as the sole measure of partisan competitiveness, but PA-18 has more of a Democratic tradition—and labor union presence—than most other districts that gave Trump (and Romney before him) comparable margins.
Republicans undoubtedly appear to be in serious danger of losing their 24-seat (now, perhaps, 23-seat) House majority later this year. But any implication that the number of seats gained by Democrats in November could approach triple figures is not exactly realistic.
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
Special Election Recap: Alabama Shakes (Up the Senate)
Here are a few things we learned from the dramatic victory of Doug Jones over Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate special election last night:
1. Special election results are often over-interpreted as political harbingers, and this particular election would no doubt have turned out much differently if Republicans hadn't nominated Roy Moore. At the same time, it's fair to say that the outcome in Alabama constitutes one more data point indicating a major shift in the national partisan climate over the past year—when combined with the New Jersey and Virginia elections in November, the results of other scattered special elections elsewhere, and the increasingly pro-Democratic trend in the generic ballot and distribution of party identification in the population.
2. Moore really was one of the all-time worst candidates for major political office in a competitive race. Even before the sexual predation and assault accusations surfaced last month, he had almost lost an election for state supreme court in 2012 and was running ahead of Doug Jones by only about 10 points in a state Trump had won by 28 the year before. Moore raised very little money and barely campaigned in public, leaving the state entirely over the final weekend before the election. (He also demonstrated very little understanding of major issues that he would be voting on as a senator.)
3. Whether your post-election analysis of choice emphasizes the successful Democratic mobilization of the African-American vote on Jones's behalf or the defection from Moore of traditionally Republican well-to-do suburban whites, both developments represent major political stories (and both were critical to Jones's chances of victory in a normally safe Republican state). Moore was the kind of figure who not only provoked energetic opposition from the Democratic base but also failed to inspire unity (and similarly enthusiastic turnout rates) among the members of his own party. The biggest danger for national Republicans heading into 2018 is that Donald Trump shares these attributes as well.
4. It's hard to beat somebody with nobody in politics, and Democrats have nominated a lot of nobodies for office in red states lately. (The last time that this particular seat was up for election in 2014, in fact, the Democratic candidate was literally nobody.) The party was very fortunate to have a viable candidate on hand in Jones (who needed to jump in the race before knowing that Moore would wind up being the Republican nominee), demonstrating the importance of recruiting high-quality candidates even when most voters can be predicted to simply vote the party line. The pro-Democratic drift of well-educated, prosperous suburbanites is particularly key for Democratic chances in future elections, from Congress all the way down to the state and local level. Well-educated, prosperous people tend to be strong potential candidates for political office, and the suburbs tend to be electorally pivotal in most parts of the country. Democratic gains in the Virginia legislature last month, for example, mostly occurred in suburban districts that were already shifting Democratic in the presidential vote but where veteran Republican incumbent legislators were previously unused to facing serious challengers; a groundswell of attractive Democratic candidates is necessary for the party to take full advantage of the favorable national environment that it is likely to have in 2018.
5. The flipping of the Alabama seat will have only minor implications for the operation of the Senate over the next year; assuming that Republicans manage to push their tax reform bill through Congress before Jones is seated, any other legislative action will require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. But the prospect of a Democratic majority in the Senate after the 2018 election is now quite realistic, requiring a net gain of two seats (with Nevada and Arizona the most obvious targets) rather than the previous three. Jones's victory also increases the odds of a 50-50 Senate in 2019–2020 with Susan Collins of Maine serving as the pivotal vote—not as dramatic a shift as an outright Democratic majority would be, but still a very real complication for the Trump administration's legislative goals and executive/judicial appointment objectives heading into the 2020 election.
6. For this reason, it's pretty silly to argue that Republicans are better off with Moore losing the election. True, a Senator Moore would have been an extremely awkward presence in the Capitol, and dilemmas about how to handle the accusations against him would have created a lot of headaches for Moore's fellow Republican senators. But every seat is incalculably precious in our current partisan environment, and Mitch McConnell would presumably rather be a majority leader with Moore sniping at him from the back benches than risk losing control of the chamber entirely.
7. There's a lot of anger being directed against Steve Bannon by Washington Republicans today for supposedly saddling the party with Moore, and for vowing to help other similarly-styled candidates win Republican primaries next year. Not only does this line of argument exaggerate Bannon's personal influence over an Alabama primary election that Moore—already a well-known figure in the state—won by nearly 10 points, but it also ignores the fact that Republicans have been regularly nominating controversial if not toxic candidates for high office since the beginning of the Obama administration. The bigger problem, of which Bannon's rise is more symptom than cause, is that an ideologically-oriented party is particularly susceptible to popular appeals based on doctrinal purity and punch-the-left confrontationalism over other attributes such as electability, policy command, and general suitability for office. It's probably true that the conservative media bears a lot of responsibility for this trend, but blaming Bannon or Breitbart alone is overly simplistic—and convenient. After all, Roy Moore was a popular conservative hero back when Steve Bannon was still a Hollywood movie producer.
1. Special election results are often over-interpreted as political harbingers, and this particular election would no doubt have turned out much differently if Republicans hadn't nominated Roy Moore. At the same time, it's fair to say that the outcome in Alabama constitutes one more data point indicating a major shift in the national partisan climate over the past year—when combined with the New Jersey and Virginia elections in November, the results of other scattered special elections elsewhere, and the increasingly pro-Democratic trend in the generic ballot and distribution of party identification in the population.
2. Moore really was one of the all-time worst candidates for major political office in a competitive race. Even before the sexual predation and assault accusations surfaced last month, he had almost lost an election for state supreme court in 2012 and was running ahead of Doug Jones by only about 10 points in a state Trump had won by 28 the year before. Moore raised very little money and barely campaigned in public, leaving the state entirely over the final weekend before the election. (He also demonstrated very little understanding of major issues that he would be voting on as a senator.)
3. Whether your post-election analysis of choice emphasizes the successful Democratic mobilization of the African-American vote on Jones's behalf or the defection from Moore of traditionally Republican well-to-do suburban whites, both developments represent major political stories (and both were critical to Jones's chances of victory in a normally safe Republican state). Moore was the kind of figure who not only provoked energetic opposition from the Democratic base but also failed to inspire unity (and similarly enthusiastic turnout rates) among the members of his own party. The biggest danger for national Republicans heading into 2018 is that Donald Trump shares these attributes as well.
4. It's hard to beat somebody with nobody in politics, and Democrats have nominated a lot of nobodies for office in red states lately. (The last time that this particular seat was up for election in 2014, in fact, the Democratic candidate was literally nobody.) The party was very fortunate to have a viable candidate on hand in Jones (who needed to jump in the race before knowing that Moore would wind up being the Republican nominee), demonstrating the importance of recruiting high-quality candidates even when most voters can be predicted to simply vote the party line. The pro-Democratic drift of well-educated, prosperous suburbanites is particularly key for Democratic chances in future elections, from Congress all the way down to the state and local level. Well-educated, prosperous people tend to be strong potential candidates for political office, and the suburbs tend to be electorally pivotal in most parts of the country. Democratic gains in the Virginia legislature last month, for example, mostly occurred in suburban districts that were already shifting Democratic in the presidential vote but where veteran Republican incumbent legislators were previously unused to facing serious challengers; a groundswell of attractive Democratic candidates is necessary for the party to take full advantage of the favorable national environment that it is likely to have in 2018.
5. The flipping of the Alabama seat will have only minor implications for the operation of the Senate over the next year; assuming that Republicans manage to push their tax reform bill through Congress before Jones is seated, any other legislative action will require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. But the prospect of a Democratic majority in the Senate after the 2018 election is now quite realistic, requiring a net gain of two seats (with Nevada and Arizona the most obvious targets) rather than the previous three. Jones's victory also increases the odds of a 50-50 Senate in 2019–2020 with Susan Collins of Maine serving as the pivotal vote—not as dramatic a shift as an outright Democratic majority would be, but still a very real complication for the Trump administration's legislative goals and executive/judicial appointment objectives heading into the 2020 election.
6. For this reason, it's pretty silly to argue that Republicans are better off with Moore losing the election. True, a Senator Moore would have been an extremely awkward presence in the Capitol, and dilemmas about how to handle the accusations against him would have created a lot of headaches for Moore's fellow Republican senators. But every seat is incalculably precious in our current partisan environment, and Mitch McConnell would presumably rather be a majority leader with Moore sniping at him from the back benches than risk losing control of the chamber entirely.
7. There's a lot of anger being directed against Steve Bannon by Washington Republicans today for supposedly saddling the party with Moore, and for vowing to help other similarly-styled candidates win Republican primaries next year. Not only does this line of argument exaggerate Bannon's personal influence over an Alabama primary election that Moore—already a well-known figure in the state—won by nearly 10 points, but it also ignores the fact that Republicans have been regularly nominating controversial if not toxic candidates for high office since the beginning of the Obama administration. The bigger problem, of which Bannon's rise is more symptom than cause, is that an ideologically-oriented party is particularly susceptible to popular appeals based on doctrinal purity and punch-the-left confrontationalism over other attributes such as electability, policy command, and general suitability for office. It's probably true that the conservative media bears a lot of responsibility for this trend, but blaming Bannon or Breitbart alone is overly simplistic—and convenient. After all, Roy Moore was a popular conservative hero back when Steve Bannon was still a Hollywood movie producer.
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
What Matters for Moore Is the View from Alabama, Not Washington
The accelerating litany of serious accusations against U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama has prompted incumbent Republican senators to denounce and distance themselves from their party's embattled nominee over the past few days. Reactions within the chamber that Moore seeks to join next month have been uniformly harsh, ranging from the withdrawal of previous endorsements to calls for Moore to be immediately expelled from the Senate if he were to win the December 12 election.
Reporters are busy this week chasing down reluctant Republicans in Capitol hallways to put them on record about the Moore situation, revealing what appears to be a rough consensus that (a) Moore should drop out of the race and (b) a more suitable Republican candidate should mount a write-in campaign regardless of whether he does drop out.
This is all perfectly newsworthy, but not likely to matter too much in terms of what happens from here. Moore has no particular reason to listen to what Washington Republicans say. If he thought that he couldn't win despite their opposition, he might consider withdrawing to avoid a humiliating defeat—but why would he think that? After all, Moore defeated the appointed incumbent, Luther Strange, by nine points in the Republican primary runoff even though Strange enjoyed the backing of virtually all of the party's national elected leadership.
Of course, the most powerful Republican in Washington has yet to weigh in; a presidential denouncement would be more damaging to Moore than criticisms from the likes of Jeff Flake and Susan Collins. Even so, Trump inserting himself into the race seems like a necessary but hardly sufficient prerequisite for a Moore withdrawal or successful end-around of the official Republican nominee via write-in balloting.
And the president seems unlikely to devote himself to pushing Moore out once he returns to the White House from his trip overseas. Trump felt burned by the primary, when he campaigned for Strange only to see Alabama Republicans choose Moore instead, and will not be enthusiastic about taking on the risk of exhibiting political weakness a second time in the same election. Plus, the specific nature of the accusations against Moore makes the whole issue a treacherous one for Trump to raise given his own personal record. He's in a poor position to adopt the this-is-not-what-the-Republican-Party-stands-for argument that George H. W. Bush made when disavowing David Duke's 1990 campaign against Louisiana senator Bennett Johnston, the closest parallel to the current situation in modern Senate history.
It's only natural for a press corps based in Washington to adopt a Washington-centric view of the race. But Alabama residents are more likely to be influenced by other Alabama residents. If Moore drops out (an unlikely development), if a write-in campaign gains traction, or if a critical mass of Republican voters skips the election or defects to Democratic nominee Doug Jones, it will reflect the political environment in Alabama and the behavior of party leaders, elected officials, and media outlets at the state level. And so far, the Moore revelations have been met with much less shock and outrage in the places where this election will actually be decided than in the Potomac-adjacent environs where Republican federal officeholders preside with waning influence over the untidy affairs of their party.
Reporters are busy this week chasing down reluctant Republicans in Capitol hallways to put them on record about the Moore situation, revealing what appears to be a rough consensus that (a) Moore should drop out of the race and (b) a more suitable Republican candidate should mount a write-in campaign regardless of whether he does drop out.
This is all perfectly newsworthy, but not likely to matter too much in terms of what happens from here. Moore has no particular reason to listen to what Washington Republicans say. If he thought that he couldn't win despite their opposition, he might consider withdrawing to avoid a humiliating defeat—but why would he think that? After all, Moore defeated the appointed incumbent, Luther Strange, by nine points in the Republican primary runoff even though Strange enjoyed the backing of virtually all of the party's national elected leadership.
Of course, the most powerful Republican in Washington has yet to weigh in; a presidential denouncement would be more damaging to Moore than criticisms from the likes of Jeff Flake and Susan Collins. Even so, Trump inserting himself into the race seems like a necessary but hardly sufficient prerequisite for a Moore withdrawal or successful end-around of the official Republican nominee via write-in balloting.
And the president seems unlikely to devote himself to pushing Moore out once he returns to the White House from his trip overseas. Trump felt burned by the primary, when he campaigned for Strange only to see Alabama Republicans choose Moore instead, and will not be enthusiastic about taking on the risk of exhibiting political weakness a second time in the same election. Plus, the specific nature of the accusations against Moore makes the whole issue a treacherous one for Trump to raise given his own personal record. He's in a poor position to adopt the this-is-not-what-the-Republican-Party-stands-for argument that George H. W. Bush made when disavowing David Duke's 1990 campaign against Louisiana senator Bennett Johnston, the closest parallel to the current situation in modern Senate history.
It's only natural for a press corps based in Washington to adopt a Washington-centric view of the race. But Alabama residents are more likely to be influenced by other Alabama residents. If Moore drops out (an unlikely development), if a write-in campaign gains traction, or if a critical mass of Republican voters skips the election or defects to Democratic nominee Doug Jones, it will reflect the political environment in Alabama and the behavior of party leaders, elected officials, and media outlets at the state level. And so far, the Moore revelations have been met with much less shock and outrage in the places where this election will actually be decided than in the Potomac-adjacent environs where Republican federal officeholders preside with waning influence over the untidy affairs of their party.
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Alabama Special Election Recap: A Bad Day for Republican Governance
Donald Trump interrupted his Friday campaign speech on behalf of Alabama senator Luther Strange to engage in a digression about the decline of football in general and the protests of Colin Kaepernick in particular, following up with a barrage of tweets on the subject over the following days that also rescinded a White House invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors. As with many such developments, the initial news media response (to briefly paraphrase: "?!?!?!?") soon evolved into a discussion of whether or not Trump's attacks amounted to smart politics. Some observers judged the president's actions a mistake, while others argued that Trump's behavior reflected an effective strategy of harnessing racial tension and opposition to social change within the American public. "This kind of thing," wrote Rich Lowry of National Review, "is why he's president."
Because much of our punditry views politics primarily through an electoral frame, "smart politics" is generally defined as an action that helps one party win popular support at the expense of the other. It's quite possible that a majority of the voting population sides with Trump on the Kaepernick issue, especially if Trump's preferred interpretation of the protests—that players who demonstrate during the pregame national anthem performance are "disrespecting" the flag, the troops, and the nation—wins broad acceptance.
But politics is about more than winning elections, and the Republican Party's current problems have little to do with the party's relative strength compared to the Democrats. Today brought three significant developments in the world of Republican politics, all carrying relatively minimal implications for electoral competition between the parties—but with much more serious (negative) consequences for the GOP's deteriorating capacity to govern.
The first development was the Senate Republican conference's public acknowledgement that the Graham-Cassidy health care reform bill lacks sufficient support to win a vote on the floor. From a purely electoral calculation, congressional Republicans are probably better off abandoning their "repeal and replace" efforts than enacting a law that would result in millions of Americans losing health insurance coverage beginning in the 2018 election year. But the inability to pass legislation through Congress addressing the party's top domestic priority is not only a source of embarrassment for Republican leaders and exasperation for Republican activists, but also represents a significant sunk cost of time and energy over the past nine months that could have been devoted instead to taxes, infrastructure, or other more promising matters.
The second big news item of the day was Senator Bob Corker's announcement that he would not seek a third term in 2018. Corker's retirement does little to change the electoral math—Tennessee is decidedly inhospitable territory for Democratic candidates even without a popular incumbent on the ballot—but removes a capable, pragmatic, leadership-friendly senator from a Republican conference in need of legislative heft.
Third, former state supreme court justice Roy Moore easily defeated Strange, the appointed incumbent, in the Alabama Republican Senate primary. Thanks to Alabama's deep red partisan alignment, Moore is unlikely to jeopardize the Republican Party's hold on the seat in the December general election. But his future arrival in the Senate will create its own set of difficulties for the GOP. Moore ran as an open opponent of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and his propensity for attention-getting stunts and remarks is likely to put his fellow Republican senators in an awkward position on a regular basis. Moore's demonstrated level of policy command also suggests that he will not turn out to be a legislative workhorse in Washington.
Moore's triumph over Strange will also further damage the already-faltering relationship between Trump and McConnell. Trump will be predictably furious at Strange's defeat after he endorsed, and campaigned for, the senator in part at McConnell's urging, and will seek to shift blame for this embarrassment onto a Senate leader whom he already holds responsible for failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. An intensifying civil war within the Republican Party between its two most powerful leaders, or between "insider" and "outsider" factions of conservatives, bodes ill for the chances of productive, functional governance over the next 16 months.
Perhaps a public appeal increasingly centered on themes of cultural and nationalist nostalgia simultaneously helps a party win elections and renders it inherently ill-equipped for the process of governing. At the least, the results tonight confirm that the potency of popular rebellion from the right remains alive and well within the Republican Party in the post-2016 era. As I remarked to Jeff Stein of Vox, "You might have thought that a Trump presidency and having Republicans control Congress would relieve that pressure valve—that with Hillary and Obama off the scene, some of that anti-establishment, anti-Republican leadership sentiment would dissipate. What we're seeing in Alabama is that that's not the case." The next question is to what extent Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, throws his own lot in with the rebels.
Because much of our punditry views politics primarily through an electoral frame, "smart politics" is generally defined as an action that helps one party win popular support at the expense of the other. It's quite possible that a majority of the voting population sides with Trump on the Kaepernick issue, especially if Trump's preferred interpretation of the protests—that players who demonstrate during the pregame national anthem performance are "disrespecting" the flag, the troops, and the nation—wins broad acceptance.
But politics is about more than winning elections, and the Republican Party's current problems have little to do with the party's relative strength compared to the Democrats. Today brought three significant developments in the world of Republican politics, all carrying relatively minimal implications for electoral competition between the parties—but with much more serious (negative) consequences for the GOP's deteriorating capacity to govern.
The first development was the Senate Republican conference's public acknowledgement that the Graham-Cassidy health care reform bill lacks sufficient support to win a vote on the floor. From a purely electoral calculation, congressional Republicans are probably better off abandoning their "repeal and replace" efforts than enacting a law that would result in millions of Americans losing health insurance coverage beginning in the 2018 election year. But the inability to pass legislation through Congress addressing the party's top domestic priority is not only a source of embarrassment for Republican leaders and exasperation for Republican activists, but also represents a significant sunk cost of time and energy over the past nine months that could have been devoted instead to taxes, infrastructure, or other more promising matters.
The second big news item of the day was Senator Bob Corker's announcement that he would not seek a third term in 2018. Corker's retirement does little to change the electoral math—Tennessee is decidedly inhospitable territory for Democratic candidates even without a popular incumbent on the ballot—but removes a capable, pragmatic, leadership-friendly senator from a Republican conference in need of legislative heft.
Third, former state supreme court justice Roy Moore easily defeated Strange, the appointed incumbent, in the Alabama Republican Senate primary. Thanks to Alabama's deep red partisan alignment, Moore is unlikely to jeopardize the Republican Party's hold on the seat in the December general election. But his future arrival in the Senate will create its own set of difficulties for the GOP. Moore ran as an open opponent of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and his propensity for attention-getting stunts and remarks is likely to put his fellow Republican senators in an awkward position on a regular basis. Moore's demonstrated level of policy command also suggests that he will not turn out to be a legislative workhorse in Washington.
Moore's triumph over Strange will also further damage the already-faltering relationship between Trump and McConnell. Trump will be predictably furious at Strange's defeat after he endorsed, and campaigned for, the senator in part at McConnell's urging, and will seek to shift blame for this embarrassment onto a Senate leader whom he already holds responsible for failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. An intensifying civil war within the Republican Party between its two most powerful leaders, or between "insider" and "outsider" factions of conservatives, bodes ill for the chances of productive, functional governance over the next 16 months.
Perhaps a public appeal increasingly centered on themes of cultural and nationalist nostalgia simultaneously helps a party win elections and renders it inherently ill-equipped for the process of governing. At the least, the results tonight confirm that the potency of popular rebellion from the right remains alive and well within the Republican Party in the post-2016 era. As I remarked to Jeff Stein of Vox, "You might have thought that a Trump presidency and having Republicans control Congress would relieve that pressure valve—that with Hillary and Obama off the scene, some of that anti-establishment, anti-Republican leadership sentiment would dissipate. What we're seeing in Alabama is that that's not the case." The next question is to what extent Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, throws his own lot in with the rebels.
Tuesday, May 30, 2017
November 2018 Is Still a Long Way Away
The results of the special House election in Montana last week—where the Republican candidate won by a single-digit margin in a "deep red" constituency—are best interpreted as providing one more data point in favor of the conclusion that the national political environment has undergone a substantial, though not necessarily fatal, shift away from the Republicans and towards the Democrats since the inauguration of Donald Trump. This swing is thoroughly consistent with the larger back-and-forth pattern of partisan competition for the past 25 years, in which achieving unified control of Congress and the presidency has consistently rendered a party vulnerable to immediate popular backlash.
On the basis of history alone, then, there is good reason to expect the 2018 election to produce a more favorable outcome for the Democrats than 2016. How much more favorable, however, is impossible to foresee so far in advance of the vote. Eighteen months is a long time in politics under normal conditions—conventional wisdom would have bet overwhelmingly at this stage against the final results of the 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2006, 2010, and 2016 elections. And we are not currently in normal conditions; if anything, the speed of political developments is unusually quick these days, and the level of uncertainty about future events is even higher than usual.
From today's perspective, there are at least two major political issues that are likely to exert a significant effect on the results of the 2018 midterms. One is the Trump-Russia connection and its associated complications, stretching from Wikileaks to Michael Flynn to Jared Kushner to the FBI. Though the appointment of a special prosecutor suggests that this story isn't fading anytime soon, it's impossible to predict what directions it will go over the next year and a half, and what response it will produce in the mass electorate. The key question lurking behind the Russia affair—the extent of Trump's personal knowledge of, or involvement in, any illegal or shady activity—is not much clearer now than it was at the beginning of his presidency, and there is no guarantee that the Mueller investigation will provide a clear answer before November 2018.
The second significant and unpredictable factor in 2018 will be health care: specifically, whether the Republican-controlled Congress will succeed in enacting health care reform, and—if so—what form such legislation will take. The House narrowly passed a reform bill in early May, but Senate Republicans have opted to write their own version from scratch—an effort that already seems to have encountered serious problems. Whether the Senate will be able to pass a health care bill of its own is itself difficult to determine (Republicans can only afford two defections out of a 52-member conference). And whether any bill crafted to survive the Senate gauntlet could then serve as the basis for successful reconciliation negotiations between the two chambers is itself very difficult to know in advance, at least until its major provisions come into greater focus. Whatever the Republicans wind up doing about health care, from passing nothing at all to pushing through a substantial rollback of the Affordable Care Act, is almost certain to carry an electoral cost in 2018, but how big a problem health care will be for the party is impossible to ascertain before it's apparent what the policy change (if any) will be and when it will take effect.
So even excluding the unforeseeable events—foreign crises, terrorist attacks, economic trends—that may well occur and further influence the electoral balance between the parties, we have little reason to believe that the political climate will remain stable between now and November 2018. It's more likely that things get better for the Democrats than for the Republicans, given the performance of the Trump administration and the 2017–2018 Congress so far, but the range of plausible outcomes is exceptionally wide. Due to a structural Republican advantage in the ways that House districts are drawn and in the specific Senate seats up for election in 2018, even a decided nationwide pro-Democratic trend may not prove sufficiently strong to hand the party control of either chamber.
The special election approaching on June 20th in what has become a nationally representative suburban Atlanta House district will almost certainly be treated as an electoral bellwether by the news media. But even if the results accurately reflect the political environment of the moment, we're still so far away from the midterms that there is little sense in interpreting the Georgia race as an indicator of which party is favored to win the most seats in 2018. Throwing up your hands and saying "it's just soon to tell" is not a good strategy for advancing one's career in public punditry, where the constant reading of tea leaves is part of the job description. But in this case, it is just too soon to tell—so beware of anyone who says differently.
On the basis of history alone, then, there is good reason to expect the 2018 election to produce a more favorable outcome for the Democrats than 2016. How much more favorable, however, is impossible to foresee so far in advance of the vote. Eighteen months is a long time in politics under normal conditions—conventional wisdom would have bet overwhelmingly at this stage against the final results of the 1992, 1994, 1996, 1998, 2006, 2010, and 2016 elections. And we are not currently in normal conditions; if anything, the speed of political developments is unusually quick these days, and the level of uncertainty about future events is even higher than usual.
From today's perspective, there are at least two major political issues that are likely to exert a significant effect on the results of the 2018 midterms. One is the Trump-Russia connection and its associated complications, stretching from Wikileaks to Michael Flynn to Jared Kushner to the FBI. Though the appointment of a special prosecutor suggests that this story isn't fading anytime soon, it's impossible to predict what directions it will go over the next year and a half, and what response it will produce in the mass electorate. The key question lurking behind the Russia affair—the extent of Trump's personal knowledge of, or involvement in, any illegal or shady activity—is not much clearer now than it was at the beginning of his presidency, and there is no guarantee that the Mueller investigation will provide a clear answer before November 2018.
The second significant and unpredictable factor in 2018 will be health care: specifically, whether the Republican-controlled Congress will succeed in enacting health care reform, and—if so—what form such legislation will take. The House narrowly passed a reform bill in early May, but Senate Republicans have opted to write their own version from scratch—an effort that already seems to have encountered serious problems. Whether the Senate will be able to pass a health care bill of its own is itself difficult to determine (Republicans can only afford two defections out of a 52-member conference). And whether any bill crafted to survive the Senate gauntlet could then serve as the basis for successful reconciliation negotiations between the two chambers is itself very difficult to know in advance, at least until its major provisions come into greater focus. Whatever the Republicans wind up doing about health care, from passing nothing at all to pushing through a substantial rollback of the Affordable Care Act, is almost certain to carry an electoral cost in 2018, but how big a problem health care will be for the party is impossible to ascertain before it's apparent what the policy change (if any) will be and when it will take effect.
So even excluding the unforeseeable events—foreign crises, terrorist attacks, economic trends—that may well occur and further influence the electoral balance between the parties, we have little reason to believe that the political climate will remain stable between now and November 2018. It's more likely that things get better for the Democrats than for the Republicans, given the performance of the Trump administration and the 2017–2018 Congress so far, but the range of plausible outcomes is exceptionally wide. Due to a structural Republican advantage in the ways that House districts are drawn and in the specific Senate seats up for election in 2018, even a decided nationwide pro-Democratic trend may not prove sufficiently strong to hand the party control of either chamber.
The special election approaching on June 20th in what has become a nationally representative suburban Atlanta House district will almost certainly be treated as an electoral bellwether by the news media. But even if the results accurately reflect the political environment of the moment, we're still so far away from the midterms that there is little sense in interpreting the Georgia race as an indicator of which party is favored to win the most seats in 2018. Throwing up your hands and saying "it's just soon to tell" is not a good strategy for advancing one's career in public punditry, where the constant reading of tea leaves is part of the job description. But in this case, it is just too soon to tell—so beware of anyone who says differently.
Wednesday, April 12, 2017
The Kansas Election and the Stability of American Electoral Politics
American politics over the last 25 years or so seems as if it's a roller coaster of sudden and unpredictable plot twists, each more improbable than the last: the ascension of a Republican majority in Congress for the first time in four decades; the impeachment of a sitting president; a national election decided by the idiosyncratic design of punch-card ballots in a single Florida county; a coordinated series of major terrorist attacks on American soil; two long and unresolved wars; a catastrophic economic crisis; the election of the first black president in history—followed immediately by the election of Donald Trump to the same office. The fortunes of the two parties have appeared to reverse with whiplash-inducing rapidity multiple times over this period, with neither side managing to establish an enduring hold over the affections of an impatient and dissatisfied electorate.
Pull back to a wide-angle shot, though, and our current political climate actually exhibits considerable stability. The following regularities (I don't view them as "rules," which would imply assuming an indefinite permanent validity) have largely held across the entire period from 1994 to the present, and certainly since 2000 or so:
1. The two parties are closely matched at the national level in both presidential and congressional elections.
2. The vast majority of voters are consistently loyal to a single party in both presidential and congressional voting.
3. Most individual states and congressional districts are securely and predictably Democratic or Republican in national elections.
4. However, because of #1 above, a national "wave" in favor of a single party can easily reverse control of the presidency or either house of Congress, flipping pivotal swing states and districts from Democratic to Republican (or vice versa) and even producing scattered upsets in normally safe partisan strongholds elsewhere in the nation.
5. These "waves" commonly form as a backlash against unified control of the federal government by the party in power, which tends to simultaneously alienate swing voters and disproportionately mobilize angry members of the opposition party to show up at the polls or to run for office themselves.
6. Many citizens treat their congressional vote as a referendum on the national parties and party leaders, rather than as a choice between the personal attributes of the individual candidates on the ballot.
With these six regularities in mind, let's turn to the results of Tuesday night's special election in Kansas. This was a "deep red" congressional district—by any metric, one of the 100 most Republican seats in the country—and, as we might expect, the Republican candidate won (see #2 and #3 above). However, the margin of victory was only about 7 percentage points, even though the Republican nominee was a statewide elected official while the Democrat was a political unknown who was outspent and out-organized (see #6). The closeness of the result suggests that the electoral climate has worsened considerably for Republican candidates since last November, in large part due to the disastrous first weeks of the Trump presidency (see #5 and #6).
If we compare the Kansas results to the previous general election, they appear to represent a dramatic shift in the political order over just a few short months. But if we place them in a wider context, they seem much less surprising—if anything, somewhat predictable. Even the political professionals at the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fell prey to this ultra-short-term thinking, dismissing the electoral chances of their party's congressional nominee based on the results of the 2016 election and its immediate predecessors, and thus failing to invest the organizational and financial resources in Kansas that might have made the outcome closer still.
Should they—or we—really have been all that surprised? By every conceivable indication, the Trump presidency is poised to be a massive electoral albatross for Republican candidates from coast to coast—and there is, at this stage, little reason for the party to hope that he will rectify his governing problems in time for next year's midterm elections. Whether or not Republicans actually cede control of the House in 2018 (see #1 and #4), it is near-certain that they will lose a substantial number of seats unless a major rebound occurs in the president's perceived job performance. But let's not be shocked—a newly successful congressional Democratic Party would not be a sudden departure from the patterns of recent history. Rather, it would be yet another regular occurrence in our predictable political age.
Pull back to a wide-angle shot, though, and our current political climate actually exhibits considerable stability. The following regularities (I don't view them as "rules," which would imply assuming an indefinite permanent validity) have largely held across the entire period from 1994 to the present, and certainly since 2000 or so:
1. The two parties are closely matched at the national level in both presidential and congressional elections.
2. The vast majority of voters are consistently loyal to a single party in both presidential and congressional voting.
3. Most individual states and congressional districts are securely and predictably Democratic or Republican in national elections.
4. However, because of #1 above, a national "wave" in favor of a single party can easily reverse control of the presidency or either house of Congress, flipping pivotal swing states and districts from Democratic to Republican (or vice versa) and even producing scattered upsets in normally safe partisan strongholds elsewhere in the nation.
5. These "waves" commonly form as a backlash against unified control of the federal government by the party in power, which tends to simultaneously alienate swing voters and disproportionately mobilize angry members of the opposition party to show up at the polls or to run for office themselves.
6. Many citizens treat their congressional vote as a referendum on the national parties and party leaders, rather than as a choice between the personal attributes of the individual candidates on the ballot.
With these six regularities in mind, let's turn to the results of Tuesday night's special election in Kansas. This was a "deep red" congressional district—by any metric, one of the 100 most Republican seats in the country—and, as we might expect, the Republican candidate won (see #2 and #3 above). However, the margin of victory was only about 7 percentage points, even though the Republican nominee was a statewide elected official while the Democrat was a political unknown who was outspent and out-organized (see #6). The closeness of the result suggests that the electoral climate has worsened considerably for Republican candidates since last November, in large part due to the disastrous first weeks of the Trump presidency (see #5 and #6).
If we compare the Kansas results to the previous general election, they appear to represent a dramatic shift in the political order over just a few short months. But if we place them in a wider context, they seem much less surprising—if anything, somewhat predictable. Even the political professionals at the Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fell prey to this ultra-short-term thinking, dismissing the electoral chances of their party's congressional nominee based on the results of the 2016 election and its immediate predecessors, and thus failing to invest the organizational and financial resources in Kansas that might have made the outcome closer still.
Should they—or we—really have been all that surprised? By every conceivable indication, the Trump presidency is poised to be a massive electoral albatross for Republican candidates from coast to coast—and there is, at this stage, little reason for the party to hope that he will rectify his governing problems in time for next year's midterm elections. Whether or not Republicans actually cede control of the House in 2018 (see #1 and #4), it is near-certain that they will lose a substantial number of seats unless a major rebound occurs in the president's perceived job performance. But let's not be shocked—a newly successful congressional Democratic Party would not be a sudden departure from the patterns of recent history. Rather, it would be yet another regular occurrence in our predictable political age.
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